Thesis 2: the Bible Isn't a History Textbook

The Bible Isn't a History Textbook

They brought someone to my small Christian high school to defend what I’d come to know as Literalism. Balding, weaselly-looking man (of course it was a dude), tallish, with the complexion of wasp-paper and the intellect of a gnat. Even then it was laughable how he contorted history to fit within the confines of a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Some highlights: creation happening in seven literal 24-hr periods. Job as inspired, word-for-word dialogue and actual events. Dinosaurs could have lived on earth, that the flood was a historical event that piled silt in top of their rotting carcasses quickly enough to form layers of sedimentary rock. The genealogies are perfect, and without blip or quirk. Jesus’ life as a literal timeline, that there was no such things as contradiction between the accounts of his life, that his crucifixion happened in one night, that Easter has to be on a Monday because of the biblical account of years. Dinosaurs on the fucking ark.

We had some fun with him. His face got amusingly red.

(Personality context, slightly off-topic: he had some amusing digressions, including a demonstration of how the rhythms of rock music were all mimicking, as he called it, “the sex act.”)

Later, at Church, our pastor squirmed under the same questions. How could this particular thing happen in that particular timeframe? Why did that get missed? Why isn’t there a record of that anywhere else? How come the other texts from the time period don’t mention [take your pick]? How could the earth possibly be only 6000 years old, when all of the science is pointing towards eons rather than millennia?

The pastor was a smarter guy, so his answers had marginally more depth, but even he tended to fall back on the “God can do anything” and “mysterious ways” chestnuts.

Moral: when horny, fidgety teenagers can focus long enough and easily pick apart your arguments, you’re stretching. A lot. The bible is no more a reliable textbook of history than an online Vietnamese soup recipe is a reliable account of the Communist evolution of beef-infused pho stock.

It’s not that Bible things didn’t happen. Most of them probably did. But the book we have now is a mishmash of oral mythologies, pagan rip-offs, regional rhetorical and dialectical patterning, and has been shifted and altered and tweaked and nudged to meet the needs of the developing Church. Yes, that Church: the human one. The one that needs breaking.

Because the only way to understand the bible is to understand it in the light of the flawed, human quest for understanding and meaning and the stories we tell in the pursuit of it. Science tells us that memory is flawed and frangible, so to logically assert that the bible is a perfect, line-by-line remembered account of anything is terribly naive. Even the most cursory exploration into the authorship, development, and translation of the Bible reveals that it has not remained remotely the same across history, and in fact has been rewritten (and destroyed) by many, many human hands.

In short, it’s a big, hot mess. Our mess. Our wonderful, dynamic mess.

And this is as it should be. The bible was never meant to be a time capsule, snapshot, or accurate rendering of anything. It’s a book of stories, myth, metaphor, and poetry, not history. And we do an incredible disservice to that stumbling, glorious tale to try and wrap our silly interpretation of perfection around it, or to tell our kids that yes, Adam and Eve were the first, and that their kids had sex with each other and made more kids, and that all those kids had sex with their siblings and cousins and thereby populated the earth (without catastrophic genetic consequences, either).

No, the story doesn’t work. It’s too big for that. It’s also too big to hide. We know too much. Shit, even as new teenagers snickering at that balding bundle of ridiculous falsehood, we knew it was silly, laughable, wrong. And yet, even though the evidence of myth- rather than history-making gleaned through our God-given faculties is incredibly convincing, Church can’t let go.

But it should. Myth and story are what make life worth living, especially a faith-driven one.

Keywords: The Bible Isn't a History Textbook; Faith; Deconstruction; Religion; Christian; Christianity; Church; Sin; Corruption; Scandal; Bible